This invention relates generally to devices for use in cooperative arrangement with a lift truck, and in particular, to stacking and transporting devices for use in stacking and moving stacks of tires.
In the truck tire retreading business, used truck tires are normally brought into the plant and then are stacked on pallets eight tires high until the tires are ready for processing. Because these tires weigh on the order of 125 pounds each, they are generally too heavy for a single man to lift and place the last few tires on the top of a stack. Thus, it often requires two men to complete each eight-tire stack. After being stacked on a pallet, the tires can be moved about the plant by a single man using an ordinary forklift truck.
The present method of manually stacking tires on pallets suffers from two distinct drawbacks. First, it is inefficient to require the use of two persons to stack the tires. This inefficiency is even more significant when one realizes that the second person is only needed to stack the last few tires but is not needed to begin the stack of tires or to move the tires around the plant once stacked. Second, when only a single person is available to stack the tires, that person runs the risk of injury due to overexertion in having to stack heavy tires to heights above their chest level.
What is needed are tire-stacking and transporting devices that are capable of being used without pallets in conjunction with a forklift truck and which enable a single person to stack tires and transport the stack in an efficient manner without running the risk of injury due to overexertion.